Then & Now: Recruitment & Job Hunting

The first in my series of “then & now” blogs focuses on recruitment. The ongoing and often painful process of finding candidates or looking for a job.

When looking for candidates are you still receiving hundreds of emails from an ad you’ve placed with CVs attached in multiple formats? How very last decade. This is frustrating for both the recruiter and the applicant. Being one of so many, what chances are there of their application actually being reviewed?

If you’re head hunting Linked In has become the service of choice. With over 1.6 million users in South Africa alone and populated by professionals from just about every alone it makes sense to be there looking for the candidates you need.

There are also rumours that Facebook will soon have a “job board” which, if done well, should be a rich source for recruiters and head hunters.

But there are many times when advertising a position has to be done. How to reduce the incredible admin drag? A smart way is to build a form for your website using Google Apps. Instead of sending in a CV a candidate follows a link and applies online using this form. All data is captured automatically into a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet can then be filtered according to the fields you have prescribed on the form. Now you can quite easily extract from the hundreds of applicants those that have a car and 3 or more years of experience. This list is also fully available to anyone within your company that requires access to it. No emailing attachments back and forth.

Once you have your shortlist of candidates further vetting can be done by looking at publicly available social information on each on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. This is a somewhat controversial topic and a survey of candidates in the US indicated that they would be distrustful if they knew their prospective employer was checking out their social profiles. But I don’t think it can be avoided – as soon as someone works for you they now form part of your brand and since so many now live their lives quite publicly it makes sense to see how candidates present themselves to the world. It’s a wealth of information that was just not there 10 years ago and earlier.

Additionally, I found a great infographic on Mashable which shows the evolution of job hunting. It was put together by Spark Hire and it illustrates the point very well. Here it is: